Festival preview: Global Visions promises to shock, inspire

Edmonton documentary film festival kicks off 31st year

Part of Global Visions Film Festival, an image from Chasing Ice, directed by Jeff Orlowski. The film documents photographer James Balog as he shoots glacier melt of a year and a half, with shocking results.

This year’s Global Visions Film Festival is ferociously diverse, full of shock, beauty, horror and inspiration. Sometimes all these attributes wrestle for dominance within a single movie. The gala masterpiece, How to Survive a Plague, is such a film, documenting the early days of AIDS in America. The time-lapse images of the melting glaciers in Chasing Ice silently permit no argument about the reality of global warming. These are just two of 45 documentaries running through Sunday. The filmmakers include three Oscar nominees and come from 24 countries.

To combat dwindling interest, last year Global Visions moved from November to February and broadened its programming in terms of scheduled events and subject matter. The tweak saw a 23-per-cent rise in attendance, plus a significant and hoped-for jump among 18- to 25-year-old filmgoers.

In its 31st year, Global Visions is Canada’s longest-running documentary film festival, and programming director Guy Lavallee sees no reason why it can’t compete with Toronto’s Hot Docs or any other festival, given the right chemistry. “We tend to sell ourselves short around here,” he says with a recurring laugh, noting that a good festival needs balance above almost all other factors. “There’s still a perception that documentaries are just movies that are ‘good for you.’ People remember this 1970s, dry, boring, lecturey type of film, like you’d see in school. But the form has changed so much in the last 20 years— technology has allowed so many people with so much imagination to just tell a story. It used to be cost-prohibitive, but just because you can,” he laughs again, “doesn’t mean you can do it well.”

The Global Visions organizers, including executive director Beryl Baccus, watch hundreds of films a year, scouting the best. Being exposed to so much documentary journalism puts the curator in a position to comment on humanity’s overall mood, especially as footage never before possible is easy to sneak out of dangerous places on pocket cams.

“It’s not more grim than usual,” Lavallee believes. “The nature of the form is people want to tell important, getting-under-the-rocks stories, uncovering and exposing corruption and lies. The difference, however, is if you go back to the studio days, these were the types of films you’d see as Hollywood narratives. Think about Silkwood, Kramer vs. Kramer, The China Syndrome. There were big-studio issues films that don’t get made now because they’d rather spend $200 million on a superhero movie, because oddly enough it’s more cost-effective (after profit).”

“It works out for us. Central Park Five that we’re showing this year is a great example of film that would be a narrative feature in a different era.” The documentary, by master Ken Burns, is an account of how five non-white youths were imprisoned for years for a New York rape they didn’t commit. Wampler’s Ascent, the incredible closing film about the cerebral palsy-defiant rock climber, also comes to mind as an inspirational narrative. But it’s real. (Steve Wampler will be in attendance after the closing-night screening.)

Some of Global Visions’s fare, like The Carbon Rush, is heavy, even overwhelming. But a good number of them are elevating, especially the nuanced Paul Williams Still Alive, where director Stephen Kessler is forced to shift his expectations of the former superstar, whom he ultimately just wants to befriend.

Bruce Cockburn: Pacing the Cage is another inspiring portrait. (Bernie Finkelstein, the singer’s longtime manager who helped create the film, will be at Audreys Books with his memoir, True North — A Life in the Music Business, Saturday at 2 p.m. in conjunction with the festival.)

The music doc partly examines Cockburn’s religious side, but he describes over the phone from San Francisco how he first felt writing the song If I had a Rocket Launcher after visiting Guatemalan refugee camps. “It came out of a sense of outrage, bigger than anger. There was no appropriateness about any of it. You’re in a war, you have a counter-insurgency going — but that doesn’t mean you go and strafe the refugee camps. It was subhuman behaviour and as such, warranted being stopped by any means. The people in the helicopters seemed to have forfeited their claim to humanity. I don’t believe this is true (now), but this is what it felt like: righteous anger. Once it was written, I had to wrestle with, ‘Do I sing this song for anybody or not?’ ”

Cockburn’s activist heart is a perfect match for Global Visions, which is continuing its political panel series, in its second year talking about revitalization after The Avenue, a local movie about 118th Avenue, is screened. “I’m sure it’ll be about 30 seconds before someone brings up the arena,” Lavallee smiles. The panel will feature councillors Ed Gibbons and Tony Caterina and MLA Rachel Notley.

This year also sees the addition of a short docs section. And there is also a local initiative about two artists who threw a dart, blindfolded, at a map to select where they’d do social work, which has become the film Travel by Dart: Polar Faith.

“We’re literally running out of space and time,” Lavallee notes, “and it’s a good problem to have.”

Part of Global Visions Film Festival, an image from Chasing Ice, directed by Jeff Orlowski. The film documents photographer James Balog as he shoots glacier melt of a year and a half, with shocking results.

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